The official guide to swscale for confused that consecutive non overlapping rectangles of slice_bottom special converter These generally are unscaled converters of common like for each output line the vertical scaler pulls lines from a ring buffer When the ring buffer does not contain the wanted then it is pulled from the input slice through the input converter and horizontal scaler The result is also stored in the ring buffer to serve future vertical scaler requests When no more output can be generated because lines from a future slice would be then all remaining lines in the current slice are horizontally scaled and put in the ring buffer[This is done for luma and chroma, each with possibly different numbers of lines per picture.] Input to YUV Converter When the input to the main path is not planar bits per component YUV or bit it is converted to planar bit YUV Two sets of converters exist for this the other leaves the full chroma resolution